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Fanfiction for Fanfest (kinda)

The next week will be an interesting mixture of me as a person in Iceland and me as the Eve Blogger thinking Eve stuff. That means I get to share all sorts of things no one wants to know. I like to take pictures of food for instance. I'm sure everyone that reads this will find the same excitement and satisfaction as I will.

I decided to finish this piece of fiction in time for fanfest. It is a bit longer than what I have been writing and weighs in at 10,000 words.

This is a bit different from what I have done so far. It has taken a signification amount of my creative time which is why no Origin posts have shown up (I have some pending). It is more Lore based and not focused on capsular. However, it is a story that should be familiar to just about everyone. I hope people like what I did with it. I have a lot to say about the process of writing it and why I did what I did. I will write something up about the process of it it after fanfest. As my first attempt to do something kinda Lore/world related I hope I'm heading in the right direction.

It can also be found under my Eve Stories page (my slowly growing fiction stuffs) which is located on the side bar to the right.

Over sharing of the what led me to create something different like this is after the cut. Don't click/read if you just wan't to read the fiction.

In January, after the Pod and Planet writing competition I decided I was going to try to write a longer work for Eve. The reasons were many. I had been successful in the competition. It seemed that people actually liked what I wrote fiction wise. I was enjoying myself.

Those are all good reasons. However, I also wanted to write a longer, more serious piece with a focus on Lore/World and less on playing the videogame. Some of that was because I wanted to do it for the competition. I'm not used to writing short stories and structuring them has been hard for me. Its not as much detail as I'd like to write but the right detail needs to go in.

CCP Eterne was kind enough to write me a review response. I read it and went all EMO. He criticized my grammar and he wished that I had focused on a few better pieces vs the volume that I produced. I wrote back a reply, thanked him for his critique, explained why I did some of the things that I did wrong and resolved to improve these things for the next time.

However, I was also thrown into a deep funk. Publicizing my writing is a new thing to me. Criticism may be good but that doesn't stop it from being hard to take in at times. I wrote a lot for the MUD that I played as a teenager. I had a particular person criticize me quite often and call me functionally illiterate due to my spelling and how terrible the things I wrote were. That was at an earlier time when spell check was not as nice as it was now. My best friend became my editor and between the two of us I wrote around 30,000 rooms worth of material. A zone in the mud averaged 100-200 rooms. Mine averaged 200-300 rooms and I tried to write a unique description for each room. Even the roads. My zones were some of the most popular in the game and I had the satisfaction of proving him wrong.

The thing was, he wasn't wrong. Reading hte review by CCP Eterne made me sigh. He was right and I had not conquered my biggest demon. That of my spelling and the grammar related issues. Because of it people who met me then (and maybe now) were often surprised that I did not sound like an idiot because of said poor spelling.

The thing is that I am technically dyslexic. I have a written language disability (as it is defined) that had me held back in special education classes due to my inability of spell things properly. I was diagnosed at 11 and it became the demon that haunted me for the rest of my formal education. Due to the fact that I spoke well and read well they decided that my spelling was just because I was lazy ("If you would only try..."). Enter a lot of drama, a lot of formal testing, and some relative misery that followed me around. Said issue deals with an improper ability to process phonetics which causes me to pick the wrong words, spell things phonetically, and in general not 'see' mistakes. I have to proof things that I copy several times because the copy will normally be filled with errors.

If people think what I publish is bad they'd be horrified at read streaked rough drafts that look like blood was splashed across my screen. It is pretty bad on good days and bad enough that I have to seek out Google because I break spell check on others. (You can't use a dictionary when you can't spell the word close enough to find it in the dictionary. Goggle has been such a savior.) It is why I am shy about publishing things. My early publishment was my classmates passing around my papers in hysterical tears over my mistakes for simple words. I'm gun shy but life doesn't care and I am no longer a child. I am fueled by a burn to write that I can't ignore so I plow forward and hope for the best while I try to work around my problem areas and hide them from the world.

As I read the review from CCP Eterne I decided that I had come so far (I had a 4th grade spelling level when I was 18 and had to take my last formal test about it while I placed in advanced English classes when I went to college. Go figure.) in so many areas that I would try to apply that to this and instead of going "but I have issues" I'd just use that review to reminded me that I did well and can do better. I don't have to be perfect I just need to move past where I am because success is not back there. It is somewhere ahead. Just saying, "oh well" wasn't going to cut it. I had to at least try to move beyond an "oh well". After a while it started to sound of excuses.

Excuses are tools of incompetents

that build monuments to nothing

and those that specialize in them

are seldom capable of anything else

-Unknown

(there appear to be a lot of different interpretations of that poem. The above is the way that I learned it in high school)
Its a pretty high wall and some areas I just cannot climb. I think, in general my blog is improving and my writing as well. I'll never be an editor but I do hope that these things I am bringing will be pleasurable to the people that wish to read them. Part of that goal is to just keep on improving not only my writing but the building blocks of that writing. There are things that I cannot do. That is fine. I'll work harder at accomplishing them a different way.

Comments

I personaly dont have experience with them but have you tried speech to text applications? They might just be a way to make writing easier for you, though id guess there would be other problems. There is quite a difference between the spoken word and a writen piece, at least for me.

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